"I told you so" is a refrain that's oft-heard here in the Linux blogosphere, and more often than not it refers to some fleeting Microsoft tie with FOSS that subsequently goes wrong. The latest example? It's a doozy. Redmond not only is laying off many, many thousands -- most of them in its ill-fated Nokia unit -- but also abandoning its short-lived support of Android through the Nokia X line.

Scarcely two months have passed since Red Hat announced plans to acquire open source storage company Inktank, but already the union has produced results: Inktank Ceph Enterprise 1.2, which made its debut Wednesday. Ceph is a scalable, open source, software-defined storage system that runs on commodity hardware. "Our goal is to do for storage what Linux did for servers," said Red Hat's Ross Turk.

Red Hat is famous for focusing squarely on a market and technology and building success from there, as it did with Linux. However, the company increasingly has diverged from its roots and historical laser focus on the enterprise x86 server market. The overarching theme and identity of Red Hat is still open source software, but the main driver for the company clearly is now cloud computing.

Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk threw the automotive industry into a tizzy last week, when he announced that he was throwing open the company's patents. Some hailed the move as yet more proof of the abysmal state of the United States patent system; others opined that it would give the electric car industry a boost; others just penned paeans of praise to Musk. But there were cynical reactions as well.

Individuals and businesses migrate to Linux for a variety of reasons. Disgust with Microsoft or Apple regimentation and software limitations are but two of them.
For some, the greater flexibility that comes from open source software, as well as better cost and productivity controls, are the driving factors for a move to the Linux OS. The benefits vary depending on the use case.

The Open Invention Network was created in 2005 as a white hat organization to protect Linux. It has considerable financial backing from Google, IBM, NEC, Novell, Philips, Red Hat and Sony. More than 800 organizations worldwide have joined the community by signing the free OIN license. A clamor recently has been growing for OIN to take steps to protect embedded Linux from patent pillagers.

There was a somewhat quiet, cost-free acquisition of sorts in the Linux world earlier this year when Red Hat announced it was joining forces with Red Hat Enterprise Linux community clone CentOS. The move, which effectively brings organization, governance, backing and technology of CentOS under Red Hat's brim, is interesting for a few reasons.

Open source software continues to gain momentum -- but what is not growing is an open desire among individual software developers to port their commercial Windows wares to Linux. Open source support is not a mere in or out decision. Some software makers shape their business models to take advantage of open source support for some products but not others.

Mozilla Foundation cofounder Brendan Eich -- whose recent appointment as CEO of subsidiary Mozilla Corp. sparked an uproar -- on Thursday stepped down from the post in a bid to keep the company viable. Foundation cofounder and CEO Mitchell Baker painted the move as a return to the foundation's core principles, noting that Eich made the decision "for Mozilla and our community."

Has Google been spreading FUD to discourage computer makers from using an Android OS retooled to run on legacy computers? The maintainer of the Android-x86 Project has suggested that the Justice Department should investigate whether Google has been interfering with adoption of the open source code his community is developing. The FOSS development world is hardly free of rivalry and power plays.

Adding fuel to the debate over the treatment of women in tech, Julie Ann Horvath, a developer at GitHub, has stormed out of her job, accusing the company of ignoring harassment in the workplace. One of the company's three cofounders and his wife had persistently intimidated her, and an engineer had repeatedly ripped out her code after she turned down his advances, Horvath claimed.

What if commercial software developers for popular Windows products sold Linux versions to a waiting market of open source users? Think in terms of paying a subscription fee to use a Linux version of Adobe's Photoshop image manipulation software, for starters.
Is porting commercial products like Photoshop as a paid product for Linux a viable idea?

There's no doubt privacy is a highly pertinent goal for 2014, but partnership and collaboration are nothing to sneeze at, either. That's why the news out of North Carolina last week was so exciting. "Red Hat and the CentOS Project are joining forces to build a new CentOS," the press release began, "capable of driving forward development and adoption of next-generation open source technologies."

Microsoft will stop security support for Windows XP this coming April, meaning that more than a few remaining users of the long-standing OS need to come up with an alternative plan. Almost a third of desktop computers still run Windows XP, according to Net Applications. More than 15 percent of midsize and large enterprises will still have Windows XP running on at least 10 percent of their PCs after support ends.

The Linux OS lacks an effective yet simple checking and banking tool. There are money-management tools for Linux users, of course, but most full-fledged offerings are overkill for monitoring spending patterns and balancing financial accounts. In general, Linux financial applications are either too complex to use without an accounting degree or too simple to be truly useful.

Vendor lock-in has been such a standard part of enterprise IT over the years that it often goes unnoticed and unquestioned. Recently, however, that lock-in mentality has followed enterprises to the clouds. One might not think that vendor lock-in would exist for those who use open source software or open cloud solutions. Think again.

One of the big attractions behind the growing popularity of open source software is the ability to get it and use it for free. In a world of ever-rising costs in pretty much every other aspect of business and life, "free" is an offer that's increasingly difficult to refuse. Support is one area, however, where "free" may not be all it seems -- particularly for enterprises.

Discuss the merits of the many competing desktop Linux distributions out there, and you could fill several hours with heated debate. Turn the conversation to enterprise server distros, however, and the room can become quiet very quickly. The fact is, those on the hunt for the best or easiest or cheapest enterprise Linux distro have far fewer choices.

For software developers, success is being able to maximize their chosen programming language to speed up build time. Almost as important is being able to speed up product distribution. In order to accomplish those goals, software developers need a better distribution system and access to other developers' code to build in compatibility and integration.

SalesAgility last week rolled out SuiteCRM, an application that's designed to offer a fully open source alternative to SugarCRM Professional Edition. Built upon the latest release of SugarCRM Community Edition, the software includes reporting, workflow, quotes, products, security and portal extensions designed to deliver functionality previously found only in the proprietary, paid-for editions of SugarCRM.

Security and privacy concerns may be far outweighed for many users by the convenience and appeal of the cloud, but users need to view cloud access as more than just another storage utility on the desktop. That's according to Derek Labian, CEO of cloud storage service MediaFire. Instead, cloud users need to focus on cloud performance and application functionality, Labian suggests.

Software quality is a topic close to most developers' hearts, whether they work with open source or proprietary code. Assessing quality, however, isn't always a simple matter. As a result, several efforts have sprung up to tackle the challenge, including the Coverity Scan project. Coverity began work in 2006 on the open source project, which is a joint endeavor with the Department of Homeland Security.

As CEO of AlienVault, Barmak Meftah faces enemies every day who play out their attacks from faraway lands using seemingly unbeatable weapons. One of the weapons AlienVault uses with the support of the open source community is a global report called the Open Threat Exchange that tracks threats to computer networks. The results make it possible to identify trouble spots and take corrective action.

The Cyanogen free and open source Android firmware project on Wednesday announced that it had received $7 million in a Series A round of funding in April. The investment came from Benchmark Capital and Redpoint Ventures. "What will change is our capabilities, our speed, and our size," wrote Cyanogen founder Steve Kondik. "I am not going to let anyone stagnate."

Aiming to capture a piece of the market that has given the Raspberry Pi such a warm reception, SolidRun on Wednesday announced a new tiny computer of its own dubbed the "CuBox-i." Available in four models with prices starting at $45, the tiny computer includes an OpenGL|ES 2.0 GPU with OpenCL 1.1 embedded profile support; and up to four i.MX6 Cortex A9 ARM processors with as much as 1.2GHz each.

Canonical raised more than $12 million over 30 frantic days of crowdfunding its ambitious Ubuntu Edge superphone project, but it was still short some $20 million by the time the effort closed on Wednesday. The company's target was $32 million. "We raised $12,809,906, making the Edge the world's biggest ever fixed crowdfunding campaign," wrote Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth.

There's no denying the growing impact of open source software in today's business landscape, but for those who want additional proof of the open approach's viability, there's OpenStax College. Since 2012, the initiative has been producing peer-reviewed open source textbooks under a Creative Commons license. This year, the organization expects to save some 40,000 students about $3.7 million.

What a difference a day makes, as the old saying goes -- or, perhaps more aptly here in the Linux community, what a difference an app makes. Which app, you may ask? Why that would be Microsoft Office for Android, of course -- the arrival of which a few weeks ago has caused no shortage of jubilation in the Linux blogosphere. "It looks like Linus has won," noted a recent article.

The discussion and debate over open source cloud software's compatibility with cloud leader Amazon's proprietary APIs was just beginning when the 451 Group released "The OpenStack Tipping Point" in April. With the advancement of the OpenStack software and community -- along with lingering questions about the desired level of compatibility with Amazon's cloud -- the matter is heating up.

Fans of Ubuntu will have to be forgiven if they've been a little distracted lately. After all, exactly two weeks ago Canonical launched its crowdfunding campaign for the new Ubuntu Edge smartphone. It's not just any crowdfunding campaign, of course -- it's a big one. Really big -- to the tune of $32 million. No one ever said Mark Shuttleworth lacked ambition.